Meet Our Students

Sam King-Shaw is a PhD student and Schomburg Fellow at UB. Sam’s research explores questions of relationality, desire, (freedom) dreams, and genealogy in twentieth-century Black queer cultural production.

Kit is a PhD student, and their research interests surround issues of interracial solidarity in social movements, with a particular interest in Asian-Black solidarity in the COVID era and its aftermath.

Kailey is a PhD student interested in the interplay between the political imaginary and the transformative power of language. Her research focuses on imagining political alternatives to neoliberal, neocolonial capitalism.

Asiyah Noujdi's research focuses on the way that contemporary media representations of marginalized peoples, with a focus on trans women, affects societal depictions and attitudes towards marginalized peoples within the contemporary media and socio-cultural landscape.

Joyce's research examines how universities in Nigeria and the US respond to sexual and gender-based violence, and whether those responses actually mean anything to the students they are supposed to protect. She is particularly interested in the gap between what institutions say they do and what students experience, and in building a framework grounded in African feminist thought that centers care, trust, and relational accountability over procedural compliance.